Keeping an eye on the ACP

Via RTE:

Catholic Church authorities need to distinguish between the paedophile priest and the cleric who committed a minor indiscretion with a teenager 30 or more years ago, according to a spokesman for the new Association of Catholic Priests.
Father Tony Flannery said many priests who attended a meeting in Co Mayo this afternoon sympathised with colleagues who had been excluded from ministry even though their behaviour since the transgression had been blameless.

That's where they're beginning? Some sex offenders need to be treated more leniently than others?

Fr Flannery was speaking to the media after his organisation's first regional meeting, and he decides to go with that line? That is not something that the priests of Ireland need at the moment.

Now, the handling of allegations against priests does need to be scrutinised. As with any system of justice, the rights and reputation of all parties concerned - including the accused - need to be handled carefully. However, I do not think that the best way of addressing that issue is launching a media debate and I do not think that it's a good idea to engage in special pleading for those who might have committed a minor indiscretion with a teenager thirty years ago. That kind of talk seems to downplay the seriousness of sexual expolitation.

To my mind, a different kind of renewal is needed - a spiritual renewal of our clergy and a more impassioned preaching of Christ and His Gospel.

Post scriptum: I wonder how this is going to play out in the media... Fr Flannery has the reputation of a media-darling, so I wouldn't be surprised if this statement were largely overlooked. Were a more theologically conservative priest or, God forbid, a bishop to make such a comment, he'd probably be flayed alive. However, it'll be interesting to see whether tomorrow's newspapers tear into Fr Flannery or give him an easy ride.

Iggy is at it again...

Can you believe that this letter to the Irish Times is from a Catholic priest?

Madam, – I read with interest the report of your correspondent Paddy Agnew on the Vatican’s opposition to the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Robert Edwards for his pioneering work in the field of in vitro fertilisation (World News, October 6th). It appears it opposes IVF because it separates conception from the “conjugal act”. I wonder what St Joseph and Mary would make of this controversy. – Yours, etc,

Fr IGGY O’DONOVAN,
Shop Street,
Drogheda, Co Louth.

I'm speechless.

RTE & the Boycott

From David Quinn's column in the Irish Independent:

If a single solitary person was to call on people to boycott RTE on a given day of the week in protest against, say, its perceived bias, how do you imagine RTE would react? I'd imagine they'd ignore the call completely and among themselves dismiss the person as a crank.
But when a single solitary person has the Catholic Church in his or her sights, it's a different matter entirely. Then the person gets all the publicity they can handle. This is exactly what happened to Jennifer Sleeman when she called on Catholics to boycott Masses last Sunday in protest against the male-only priesthood.
In the event, the call for the boycott was a total damp squib. There was no measurable effect on Mass attendance and some priests said that, if anything, attendance was up. Nonetheless, RTE covered the event as though it wasn't a total failure.
(snip)
We might ask how would RTE react if on 'Boycott RTE Day', there was no discernible drop in its viewership figures, but nevertheless TV3 went out of its way to give the impression that something of note had really taken place? Without doubt, RTE would see it is a piece of anti-RTE campaigning by TV3.